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This 2007 book studies the impact of the media on politics in the United States during the last half-century.
Political interest is the strongest predictor of 'good citizenship', yet little is known about it. This book explains why some people find politics interesting while others don't.
The new media environment has challenged the role of professional journalists as the primary source of politically relevant information. After Broadcast News puts this challenge into historical context, arguing that it is the latest of several critical moments, driven by economic, political, cultural, and technological changes, in which the relationship among citizens, political elites, and the media has been contested. Out of these past moments, distinct "media regimes" eventually emerged, each with its own seemingly natural rules and norms, and each the result of political struggle with clear winners and losers. The media regime in place for the latter half of the twentieth century has been dismantled, but a new regime has yet to emerge. Assuring this regime is a democratic one requires serious consideration of what was most beneficial and most problematic about past regimes and what is potentially most beneficial and most problematic about today's new information environment.
A state-of-the-art account of what we know and do not know about the effects of digital technology on democracy.
I examine the political implications of the three most important changes in the media environment that occurred in the last half-century: broadcast television, cable television, and the Internet. The thesis starts by outlining a unifying theoretical framework to examine changes in the media environment and then follows the major changes in chronological order, focusing on implications for knowledge and turnout in the first part and on the impact on vote decisions in the second part. The theory extends existing explanations of political learning by focusing explicitly on the way in which different prerequisites for learning jointly affect the acquisition of political knowledge. Some media environments leave a lot of room for people's interests and skills to guide their media use and political learning, while others impose strong constraints on everyone. Before cable, the homogeneity of content on broadcast stations during the dinner hour meant that individual-level factors played a relatively minor role in guiding political learning. As a result, many Americans, even the less educated, less interested, and less partisan, watched national and local news and absorbed at least some of what they saw. As cable and Internet offer greater content choice, some people who were sufficiently interested to watch news in the absence of alternatives, abandon the news for entertainment programming. Others, in contrast, take advantage of the new opportunities to acquire even more information than before. As a consequence, the gap between the most and the least knowledgeable segments in the electorate widens. Furthermore, to the extent that knowledge motivates people to vote, the knowledge gap translates into a turnout gap. The second part of the thesis examines consequences of changing media environments for aggregate voting behavior. Less educated citizens who started to learn about politics from broadcast news had a moderating influence on election outcomes. Greater choice removes this moderating influence again. Politically interested people who continue to follow the news despite the increasing allure of around-the-clock entertainment are also more partisan. Cable television and the Internet, by increasing people's media choices, thus weaken the moderate elements and produce a higher concentration of partisans in the voting public, leading to greater political polarization among voters.
This work examines what happens when comedy becomes political, and politics become funny. A series of original essays focus on a range of programmes, from 'The Daily Show' to 'South Park'.
These essays discuss US policy in regulating the media and the reconciliation of the First Amendment.
The American public has consistently declared itself less concerned with foreign affairs in the post-Cold War era, even after 9/11, than at any time since World War II. How can it be, then, that public attentiveness to U.S. foreign policy crises has increased? This book represents the first systematic attempt to explain this apparent paradox. Matthew Baum argues that the answer lies in changes to television's presentation of political information. In so doing he develops a compelling "byproduct" theory of information consumption. The information revolution has fundamentally changed the way the mass media, especially television, covers foreign policy. Traditional news has been repackaged into numerous entertainment-oriented news programs and talk shows. By transforming political issues involving scandal or violence (especially attacks against America) into entertainment, the "soft news" media have actually captured more viewers who will now follow news about foreign crises, due to its entertainment value, even if they remain uninterested in foreign policy. Baum rigorously tests his theory through content analyses of traditional and soft news media coverage of various post-WWII U.S. foreign crises and statistical analyses of public opinion surveys. The results hold key implications for the future of American politics and foreign policy. For instance, watching soft news reinforces isolationism among many inattentive Americans. Scholars, political analysts, and even politicians have tended to ignore the soft news media and politically disengaged citizens. But, as this well-written book cogently demonstrates, soft news viewers represent a largely untapped reservoir of unusually persuadable voters.